In techno kitchens, appliances can do chef's work too

Saturday

Jul 1, 2006 at 12:01 AM

BY JEFF SMITHSCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

At the glitzy Roth Concept Center near Denver International Airport, refrigerator compartments can be temperature-programmed to the degree, extending the freshness of vegetables and other food items.
A wine-cooling unit can be set separately for white and red wine and, if desired, wired to the home's burglar alarm system.
A French cooktop allows four dishes to be cooked simultaneously at different temperatures. A dual-stacked gas burner has a setting capable of melting chocolate into a paste without burning it. And some of the appliances can "self-diagnose" or alert users when service is required.
The Roth Concept Center is a place to visualize the kitchen of tomorrow, today.
This isn't the domestic-robot future portrayed in Woody Allen's 1973 hit "Sleeper," but, after all, the setting for that movie was 2173.
Nor will one find here the Internet- or cable-TV-ready appliances that have been hyped for years and are present in some kitchens today but in small numbers.
In this kitchen, technology has a pragmatic bent.
"When people cook they want to get great results," said John Thielen, president of Denver-based Roth Distributing, which carries Wolf and SubZero appliances.
SAVING TIME, MONEY
Over the years, many defined the "smart" kitchen as one where appliances are connected to the Internet, cell phones, laptop computers or other remote-control devices.
The idea was that busy dual-income households could control their kitchen from anywhere to improve efficiency and free up time.
While there is a move toward such automation, what's most prevalent today are appliances that are simply more intelligent - thanks to microprocessors, sensors and other technology - while still being simple to use.
"Lots of new appliances are faster and smarter than they were before, but relatively few are networked (to the Internet)," said Matt Dean, executive vice president of sales and marketing of Smarthome, a retailer of intelligent devices.
Prices have been too high and the question is, "What is the consumer going to care about?" Dean said.
Ted Selker, who oversees kitchen research projects at MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., thinks people value things that save them time and energy and help them do what they want to do.
TOO AUTOMATED?
But automation, Selker says, often makes people feel out of control or confuses them.
He cites a friend in Boulder, Colo., who spent tens of thousands of dollars to automate his house in 1993. The system, which controlled everything from the heating to the sprinkler, contained hundreds of wires and racks of hardware.
"Someone would push a button somewhere in the house that would cause someone else to shriek," Selker said. "His wife wouldn't stay in the house when he was gone. A sensor would go bad and shut down the hot water system or the furnace. You'd have to be a mad magician to turn it back on."
When the family moved to a new house nearly a decade later, his friend bought a device from the hardware store for $69 that could check for carbon monoxide and a device for $49 that could control the lawn-sprinkler system.
"He was devastated," Selker joked. "That's kind of where my aesthetic is. You can make it so complicated . . . where everything has to work perfectly."
Of course, home automation has come a long way since then, but Selker still believes that "making smart things that work by themselves is a more tractable beginning. . . . If you look at a modern Wolf (kitchen appliance), you're paying several thousands of dollars for simplicity."
Over the years, his Counter Intelligence research group has focused on making common kitchen devices smarter.
For example, the group has developed oven mitts that tell a cook how hot an item is, kitchen knives that can detect harmful bacteria, a smart sink that won't scald your hands and will adjust the spigot automatically.
Selker said he is particularly excited about the team's research into combining relatively inexpensive kitchen lighting systems with increasingly affordable cameras, sensors and digital projectors to help kitchen users be aware of safety and health issues. For example, the system can be programmed to cast red light over a hot stove to warn children or detect when the floor has a wet, slippery spot that needs to be cleaned up.
At the Roth Concept Center, appliances are more sophisticated electronically and, therefore, more efficient and exacting.
"There's not a lot of outwardly visible technology," Thielen said. "The technology is under the hood."
Literally, in some cases. For a recent visitor, showroom manager Scott Baca displayed stainless steel Wolf ovens in which control panels rotate in and out of view with a touch of a button.
When not in use, the oven presents a sleek design. That's called marrying design with technology.
Here, kitchen efficiency isn't illustrated by the Internet but by refrigerator units built into kitchen cabinets under food-preparation areas, thus saving a cook from going back and forth to the refrigerator.
Or a kitchen sink unit that acts as a vegetable/pasta steamer - not only more efficient for draining pasta but safer than hauling a colander with boiling water from the stove to the sink.
Or griddles with infrared technology for quick heating or a French cooktop that allows food to be cooked at four different temperatures at the same time.
BUT IT'S NOT CHEAP
Roth also has fast-cook appliances, but "it has gotten to the point that we have heated up the oven so fast that we had to slow it down," Baca said.
Take a state-of-the-art refrigerator.
"A No. 1 one complaint people have is that things will freeze in their refrigerator," Baca said.
That's because traditional refrigerators depend on freezer air to keep the food cool.
He displays a SubZero "dual-refrigeration" system that has two separate cooling systems - one for the refrigerator and one for the freezer.
That way no air transfers between the two compartments. The unit can be programmed to an exact degree of the temperature desired in the upper and lower compartments.
"The cool part is the lettuce, the fresh vegetables," Baca said. "I've had fresh mushrooms go three weeks."
None of these appliances is cheap. A state-of-the-art SubZero refrigerator can run $5,500; a Wolf oven can run from $3,700 to $6,000 and up. Roth definitely caters to an upscale clientele.
That's not to say kitchen automation won't occur.
Dean of Smarthome predicts that the future kitchen gradually will become more Internet-equipped, especially as devices come down in price.
He already sees an increasing number of kitchens equipped with personal computers. One popular use is to refer to cooking Web sites while preparing meals.
Smarthome sells the Beyond iCEBOX Flipscreen, an under-the-kitchen-cabinet unit for $2,300. It also is equipped with TV, DVD, CD and FM radio.
"They've come down in price by $1,000 in the last two or three years," Dean said.
LESS EFFORT
A recent study of 20 households in the Boston area by the Internet Home Alliance, a network of home technology companies, offered some support for a more Internet-equipped kitchen.
The families swapped their appliances for Internet-enabled ones, including the iCEBOX Flipscreen, and most reported they were "somewhat" or "very" satisfied with how the technology enabled them to reduce their time and effort and improve the nutritional value of their meals.
Mary Wilson, who runs a Denver interior design firm, exemplifies someone keen on both the latest appliances and the automated home.
The kitchen of her Cherry Creek townhome features hidden refrigerator and food-warming drawers, a SubZero refrigerator with its own water-filtering system and a dual-fuel range that has a grill with a venting system running all the way to the roof.
"We can barbecue inside, and it doesn't get smoky at all," she said.
Is it worth the expense? "It is," Wilson said.
"If you spend the majority of your free time in your home, this makes you feel like you're getting away . . . we can do everything in the kitchen that chefs can do. It's a wonderful convenience - the flow of the kitchen - to have things located where they should be."
She and her husband, an eye surgeon, have gone further. They also gutted their five-year-old unit, in part, to put in an automated system, as a show home for Lutron Electronics.
"The whole house is automated," Wilson said, including lighting, shades, thermostats, music, security and the outside sprinkler system.
"We've been told the options are limitless; it's just how far you want to take the program," she said.
For example, the Wilsons could turn on the microwave oven in the kitchen from a remote location, say to start the popcorn while watching a movie in the living room.
"If I had young children, how cool is that?" she said. But she acknowledges she hasn't tried that yet.
Counter Intelligence has developed oven mitts that tell a cook how hot an item is, kitchen knives that can detect harmful bacteria, a smart sink that won't scald your hands.
Photo by STEVEN NICKERSON / SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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